The shedding process of a Corn Snake

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Photos that show how Rex sheds her skin

Every few months our Corn Snake named Rex sheds her skin. The time between sheds varies each time, so it’s hard to predict when it is going to happen. The first signs of the shedding process starting is that their colours become much less vibrant and their eyes become opaque, which means they lose most of their vision and as Snakes don’t have ears it can be quite a scary time for them, so not a good time to handle them. I don’t have many photos of our Corn Snake Rex shedding her skin as I like to leave her alone as much as possible to not stress her out. When she does shed her skin it’s normally in one huge (5 foot) long piece, complete with the covering of her eyes, which looks very strange! Sometimes it comes off in big pieces instead, but mostly it’s one piece of shed skin. Us humans do shed our skin, but unlike Corn Snakes we do it in very, very tiny bits all day, every day, that’s what a lot of dust is, just try not think about that next time you dust and accidentally breath it in! lol I would rather be able to do it the way snakes do, yes it would be a stressful few days, but it must feel great to shed it in one go and be all fresh and new. After shedding her scales are the opposite to before shedding, their colours become much brighter and more vibrant, she always looks most beautiful at that time.

This is the main sign that's it's time for a Corn Snake to shed their skin, humans shed their skin too, but in very tiny bits every day

When a Corn Snake is about to shed it's skin their eyes cloud over and it makes it very hard for them to see anything

A freshly shed Rex the Corn Snake looking out from between some of her shed skin